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I did my first totally open inquiry activity involving pumpkins.  Both the students and I had a great time and there was a great deal of learning taking place.  Students kept their own journals, which was too rushed to be all they could be but I’m going to do another open inquiry activity very soon!

Thanks to Amherst College for hosting us at the planetarium, Beneski Museum of Natural History and Mead Art Museum!  A wonderful close to our astronomy unit!

S2TLC Community of Practice_8th scienceS2TLC Community of PracticeMy CoP focuses on improving instruction in 8th grade science classes. I meet weekly for about an hour with another 8th grade science teacher and my student teacher. During this time we reflect on lessons from the previous week and make notes for improvement for next year. We discuss unit/lesson plans and we work to make lessons more inquiry based, exciting and effective for the students.

I have been trying to get my PLC together this

year for several weeks.  It has been difficult this

year because we have almost all new math

teachers,  lots of mandatory responsibilites, and

extended time.  I organized a small group with the

department chair, adminstrator and myself (we

meet weekly).  I finally got permission today to set up

my math PLC during the school day!  We will 

focus on improving student performance (by 

looking at student work/dataPLC_Debriefing_Draft – Johnson through protocols).

PLC_Debriefing_Draft for Holyoke Science – Hilyard

My CoP is a group of middle school science teachers. We get together once a month to discuss and create sample DDMs (District Determined Measures) to test out this year before the DDMs are required to have in science by fall 2014. We have set up groups of teachers who will work together on identifying the big ideas in each unit for each grade. Each team will then form the pre/post assessments based on these big ideas. We agreed that the pre/post assessments should be concise (5-10 questions) and should be administered on a free web-based system called assistments. We also decided that all questions will be multiple choice with the requirement of having a few blank lines to explain why they choose that particular answer. If the student cannot explain why they choose that answer, it will be marked incorrect even if they chose the correct multiple choice response. This will hopefully give us more accurate results and a wider range when we compare pre/post test data since we will be eliminating the answers of students who happened to guess the correct multiple choice response.

The debriefing form is attached above.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rita-f-pierson/student-teacher-relationships_b_3203159.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

Congrats to all the new graduates!

Jeremiah was a bullfrog. He was a good friend of mine.

another test